Books to master Perl, LAMP and web development

[lucky3]

Hi All, I am using perl from past 9 months in my current project. Most of the time I am using basics of perl and I have never exploited the full power of perl or learnt complete perl. I have decided to improve my perl skills in next 3 months and make it as a career (along with JAVA and linux skills) when I plan for job change in next 4 months. So My target is to acquire and master below skills. Perl, LAMP & Web focused experience Expert OO/Perl programmer Expert web development skills So far I have not read any text book, most of the time I am using google for help. Can anyone suggest me books to improve above skills? Is there any 1 or 2 text books that cover all of these or 1/2 online material on web is also fine? Please help me, thanks.

[marto]

Welcome to PerlMonks. Sadly you've posted in the wrong section of the forum, see Where should I post X?.

In answer to your question there are a several good resources for learning perl, and books about perl:

• The tutorials section of this site.
• http://learn.perl.org
• http://books.perl.org
• The Book Reviews section of this site.

[tospo]

For OO Perl I definitely recommend "Object Oriented Perl" by Damian Conway (Manning). Like many people, I used Perl for a long time before doing any OO stuff and I found it a lot easier to learn the concepts of OO programming in other languages that are completely built on OO design principles (for me that was Ruby). Once I understood the concepts I found OO programming in Perl much easier than I had thought.

[lucky3]

Thanks marto. Sorry for the mistake.

[umasuresh]

I like Perl Best Practices by Damian Conway: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596001735

[actualize]

Try this on for size:
Catalyst::Manual::Tutorial
Catalyst is an excellent web framework in Perl.

My Favorite book is Intermediate Perl.
Which isn't really about web programming,
but you learn about OO, data structures and subroutine references.

[absolut.todd]

If you want a dead tree version, The Definitive Guide to Catalyst is a pretty solid intro to Catalyst and looks to cover most of what you want to learn.

[rmcgowan]

There are lots of good books...my suggestions:

Perl 5 Interactive Course (see Amazon)

Perl & LWP (O'Reilly)

Learning Perl Objects, References and Modules (O'Reilly)

Perl Developers's Dictionary (Sams)

Mastering Regular Expressions (O'Reilly) Not Perl specific, but if you don't understand them, you lose ;)

Network Programming with Perl (Addison Wesley)

These are not specific to LAMP and/or web dev, you can learn much more from them. I found the first listed book was a very good and broad introduction to basic Perl as well as to more advanced topics. Good luck ;)

[starX]

Or, alternatively, use perl monks and perldocs. IMO it's usually more difficult to become a better programmer than to learn a specific facet of programming, or a programming technique, so before you start trying to become a master of OO and web development, pick up a copy of Perl Best Practices, which will help you learn to right more readable code in any language. This, in turn, will make it that much easier for you to really understand what it is that you're doing, and ask for help when you get stuck.

Focus on the fundamentals, and you'll find that it's that much easier to move on to specific techniques.

Good luck!

[morgon]

If you want to do web development unfortunately there is no way you can avoid JavaScript.

For that I can recommend the book "JavaScript - the good parts" by OReilly.

[lucky3]

Thanks to all for your responses. It was very much useful for me. But it raised few doubts in my mind about my career options as people are thinking that perl can't be good career option/ dying language. Currently I know java. I am planning to improve my servlets and JSP skills. In my job - I also use perl. So I also want to improve skills in this and acquire new skills. Based on suggestions - I am planning to learn PHP aswell. Do you think Java, perl and PHP make a good career choice? Or do u suggest to replace PHP with ruby and python? Please all try to respond. It will be useful for my career. Thanks a lot

[iangibson]

Dying? Nope.
It's certainly not as cool as those other languages, though.

[ww]

For some notion of how wide ranging the answers can be -- basicly, with respect only to Perl -- see So what is your Perl book "Trilogy" anyway?.

Oh, yes, see also Open Source Web Development with LAMP (Using Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl and Php), Addison-Wesley.

[bradcathey]

Why limit it to Perl? Check out some of the hot new frameworks like Django (Python based) or even Rails.

PHP is the language of choice for Web development these days and you will have a much better chance of finding a job knowing these than if you only have Perl under your belt.

I love Perl, and not predicting it's demise, but it is no longer the darling of the Web. Heresy here at the Monastery? Maybe, but it's the truth in Web land where I leave daily.

[xyzzy]

Heresy indeed! Let us not forget that all truth is subjective, and 95% of all people are idiots, web developers included. Let them have their pee eich pee and their piethawn. It will not save them come the Day of Wreckoning :^)

[chromatic]

PHP is the language of choice for Web development these days....

That's, to me, a sign not to work with a project. PHP's a decent templating language, but I wouldn't build anything serious in it.

[bradcathey]

Agreed. I *never* use PHP and never will, but facts is facts. I also loathe the idea of ASP(X), but it's reality.

[CountZero]

Burn the Heretic! Kill the Mutant! Purge the Unclean!